1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to computer systems, and more specifically relates to dynamic processing unit (job) relocation in a multi-nodal computer system environment based on incoming physical data.
2. Background Art
Multi-nodal systems and distributed computing systems are increasingly being employed to overcome the limitations of traditional applications deployed in standard computing systems. Distributed computing refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems. Multi-nodal computer systems and distributed computing systems as used herein may be any group or cluster of machines that are accessible by programmer applications to carry out tasks. A multi-nodal computing system consists of multiple autonomous computers or nodes that communicate through one or more networks. The multiple nodes in the computing system can be nodes of a single machine or consist of many machines connected together as a cluster or cloud of compute nodes. In multi-nodal or distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one or more computer nodes. Distributed computing in a multi-nodal environment on a single machine can be exemplified by several of today's computing technologies such as IBM® Corporation's Blue Gene®, grid computing, commercial clusters, and IBM® Corporation's RoadRunner.
These new multi-nodal environments allow individual computer processing units to be linked to each other thru new programming paradigms such that a unit of work or a typical program is parsed out and computed in a distributed manner. Furthermore this spread of work is often left up to the system such that software designers have little or no way of knowing what pieces of the application or job, referred to herein as processing units, are running where. Where there are different nodes in the distributed computing system with different capabilities, the assignment of applications or processing units to the different nodes is important to the overall efficiency of the distributed system.